More in Movies »

FILM

FILM; Who Knew How To Make The Nose New?

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

Published: November 11, 1990

ONE HUNDRED FAKE NOSES were needed to make the latest and most lavish movie version of "Cyrano de Bergerac." It also took five years, 2,000 extras, 40 studio sets, $17 million and Gerard Depardieu.

Jean-Paul Rappeneau, the director of the film, which opens Friday at the Plaza, had initial misgivings about adapting Edmond Rostand's hoary 1897 tragedy for the screen. But he never had any doubts about who should play France's most beloved hero. When the project was first offered to him in 1985, Mr. Rappeneau replied, "Only Depardieu can do this." According to Mr. Rappeneau, "The role requires someone strong who can also convey fragility. Gerard," he noted, "loves working his own fragility into his characters."

Cyrano de Bergerac is the most demanding role in French theater. Mr. Depardieu, one of France's leading actors -- one who makes so many movies ("Cyrano de Bergerac" is his 65th) that he sometimes seems like France's only leading man -- said that he had never before been given so easy a part. "Cyrano is like me," he said of the poetic, swashbuckling 17th-century soldier.

Cyrano, whose nose is as big as his heart, feels too ugly for the beautiful Roxane, so he helps the handsome but inarticulate Christian to woo her in his stead. Rough-hewn and burly, Mr. Depardieu, 41, has never been accused of being conventionally handsome, or conventional. "In any number of my films, I am a kind of Cyrano character," he said.

Mr. Depardieu, who won the best actor award for his portrayal of Cyrano at this year's Cannes Film Festival, said, "The difficulty was all physical, moving around so much while reciting the poetry."

He had no trouble, he said, learning his 1,000 rhyming lines, (down from the play's full 1,400) or conveying Cyrano's angst, a pain he attributes to Cyrano's having a severe case of arrested adolescence. "He is trapped between childhood and adulthood," Mr. Depardieu said. "Cyrano is a masochist. All actors have some Cyrano in them." Anne Brochet, the young French actress who plays Roxane, suggested that there was more than a little of Mr. Depardieu in Cyrano. "Cyrano is a man who is profoundly uneasy; he is uncomfortable in his body -- Gerard is like that in real life. He doesn't like himself."

Selecting Mr. Depardieu was about the last easy moment in the film's making. Mr. Rappeneau, 58, who had previously directed only a few, small, intimate comedies,("La Vie de Chateau," "Le Sauvage") reread the play he had loved as a boy and began feeling awful. "I mostly saw the dust, the forest of words."

Studying all the existing movie versions, some seven in all, only further depressed him. "There is so much language, it condemns the actors to speak immobilized before the cameras," he said. Even the acclaimed 1950 version, for which Jose Ferrer won an Oscar, demoralized Mr. Rappeneau. "Ferrer stands and speaks, and all the extras just stand frozen in the background as if looking at their watches," Mr. Rappeneau recalled with a shudder. "I was so terrified when I saw the early films, I kept thinking,' I've got to escape this.' "

Mr. Rappeneau was mostly mystified by Steve Martin's contemporary comedy "Roxanne," set in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. In it, the Cyrano character, played by Mr. Martin, is a fireman who can't have his nose fixed because he is allergic to anesthesia, but Roxanne, an astronomer played by Daryl Hannah, eventually falls in love with him anyway. They live happily ever after. "Its completely the opposite of the story," Mr. Rappeneau said incredulously. "It's as if you were making a movie about the war in the Pacific, and in it, the Japanese win."

Mr. Rappeneau cheered up when he learned that Orson Welles had planned to make his own version of "Cyrano de Bergerac" and spent most of 1948 holed up in a Paris hotel room writing the screenplay. His producer, Alexander Korda, eventually lost patience, and Welles gave up and began shooting "Othello" instead. Just the fact that the creator of "Citizen Kane" was interested in Rostand's play inspired Mr. Rappeneau. "I could see why Welles was intrigued: Cyrano, like him, was something of a failed genius," Mr. Rappeneau noted. "Welles wanted to find the movie hidden beneath the play."

So did Mr. Rappeneau. Enlisting Jean-Claude Carriere, a well-known screenwriter who had also adapted Shakespeare into French and helped bring Gunter Grass ("The Tin Drum") and Proust ("Swann in Love") to the screen, he began taking the play apart, scene by scene, line by line. "We wanted to break the play, shatter the armor of its theatricality," he said, "I wanted a real movie, not some static public television rendition of the play." To do so, he added action -- the actors and the cameras are almost always in constant, swirling movement -- and eliminated a great many words.

He found the original text, which is written in rolling, rhyming alexandrine couplets (also known as iambic hexameter), almost impossible to cut. "It was like a stone wall -- if you remove even a few bricks, the whole thing crumbles -- we had to find material to keep the text intact."